Conversation Partners Research Articles

Using the “Cool Versus Not Cool” Discrimination Procedure to Teach Social Skills Remotely to Adults With Autism

This study used a single-subject design to determine the effectiveness of the Cool versus Not Cool (CNC) discrimination procedure to teach social skills to three young adults with autism. The CNC procedure was administered remotely during this study. The specific social skills targeted were asking open-ended questions and responding appropriately to a conversation partner’s answers. All participants significantly increased the accuracy of the targeted social skills after receiving the intervention. The skills also maintained at relatively high levels once the intervention was removed. Future research and implications are discussed.

A Narrative Inquiry on Learners of Home-Based Exercise

Exercises performed at home are called Home-based Exercises. The suspension of classes exposed the learners to home-based exercises. The goal of this study is to explore the ideas and insights of learners on Home-based Exercise. The study utilized Basic Qualitative Research, specifically, Narrative Inquiry to gather the stories of learners. In a semi-structured interview, seven conversation partners participated. The seven conversation partners were chosen using inclusion criteria. The rigorous data analysis and data explication using Creswell’s six-step data explication elicited four central themes: (1) The Obstacle: Hindrances in Performing Home-based Exercise, (2) The Push: A way to overcome the Hindrances, (3) The Goal: An Exercise Plan, and (4) The Drive: A motivation to keep going. The findings of this study provided a picture of how learners have coped with the challenges posed by exercising at home. This study carries meaningful data as a reference for future innovation in Home-based Exercise.

Modeling syllable rhythms for interactive alignment studies

Many acoustic cues have been proposed as indicators and coordinators of upcoming turn-exchanges in conversational interactions, including syllable rhythm. Rhythmic coordination can help to explain close coordination of speech during these exchanges with intervals on the order of 250 ms or less, or with fluent and non-disruptive overlaps. While general questions surrounding speech rhythm remain unanswered, investigations of syllable alignment across partners in conversation can bypass such questions by assessing directly for patterns that align across vocal exchanges. We develop models of syllable rhythm for this purpose using hand-coded syllable durations from spontaneous conversations and from turn-taking responses elicited by recorded stimuli. Our approach builds on evidence that turn-takers begin planning their utterance approximately 0.5 s prior to turn endings. Syllable duration strings from appropriately identified frames are replaced by Gaussian curves to create oscillatory waveforms, and cross-correlation functions are applied to identify rhythmic continuities across exchanges. Patterns identified using this technique are explanatory of close coordination in the spontaneous exchanges, and supra-syllabic units such as the foot and phrase are identified as well. This syllable framework can be developed further by incorporating additional acoustic measures such as f;o and amplitude to build a multidimensional construct for interactional rhythm alignment.

Lexical Alignment is Pervasive Across Contexts in Non-WEIRD Adult-Child Interactions.

Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool-aged children and their parents in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) communities, research in other pediatric populations is sparse. This study makes significant expansions on the existing literature by focusing on alignment in naturalistic conversations of school-aged children from a non-WEIRD population across multiple conversational tasks and with different types of adult partners. Typically developing children aged 5 to 8 years (n = 45) engaged in four semi-structured conversations that differed by task (problem-solving vs. play-based) and by partner (parent vs. university student), resulting in a corpus of 180 conversations. Lexical alignment scores were calculated and compared to sham conversations, representing alignment occurring at the level of chance. Both children and adults coordinated their conversational utterances by re-using or aligning each other's word choices. This alignment behavior persisted across conversational tasks and partners, although the degree of alignment was moderated by the conversational context. These findings suggest that lexical alignment is a robust phenomenon in conversations between school-age children and adults. Furthermore, this study extends lexical alignment findings to a non-WEIRD culture, suggesting that alignment may be a coordination strategy employed by adults and children across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Phonetic adaptation in conversation: The case of Cantonese tone merging

Phonetic adaptation occurs when one interlocutor adjusts their speech to converge to or diverge from that of their conversation partner to enhance intelligibility. While most research investigates segmental adaptations, our study focuses on suprasegmentals, specifically Cantonese tone merging. Some Cantonese speakers (“mergers”) are found to merge certain lexical tones (e.g., mid-level Tone3 and low-level Tone6), which may cause confusions when interacting with non-merger speakers. Previous research has shown that a merger may unmerge a level tone pair (Tone3/Tone6) when shadowing a non-merger. However, still unclear is whether such changes result from automatic acoustic mimicking or reflect goal-oriented adaptations for intelligibility benefits. This study uses an unscripted conversation task involving a merger and a non-merger playing a video game, where productions of merged tones may cause confusions, thus motivating goal-oriented adaptations. Initial acoustic analyses focus on average F0 and F0 taken at 10 points along the contour in target Tone3 and Tone6 productions by mergers. Differences in these values for Tone3 versus Tone6 provide evidence that a merger is unmerging the tone pair. Preliminary results show increasing unmerging trends as the task progresses, suggesting progressive alignment toward a non-merger’s productions for intelligibility gains.

Using prosody to produce trust and doubt

Work presented at a 2022 ASA meeting [Thomas, 2022] demonstrated that American English talkers use acoustic prosodic variables to distinguish attitudes of incredulity and trust from a “neutral tone of voice” when asking WH-questions. The present study largely replicates these findings in new data. These data comprise both WH-questions and Yes/No questions, read by a new set of talkers in six imagined scenarios. In the previous study, “doubt” was likely confounded with “authority” due to the imagined scenario used to elicit the stimuli. In the present study, the three attitudes (doubt, neutral, trust) were crossed with dominance (participant was +/− dominant relative to their imagined conversational partner). This study examines additional acoustic variables, including the variability of word duration within utterance and the F0 slope of the longest word in each utterance. Averaging across the + /− dominance conditions and the utterance type (yes/no or WH question), duration-based variables reliably distinguished doubting from neutral utterances (with doubting utterances showing greater duration and greater variability in word duration). In contrast, F0-based variables differentiated trusting from neutral utterances, with trusting utterances showing a higher F0 over the course of the entire utterance.

Exploring English for academic purposes instructors’ perceptions of speech fluency through developing and piloting a rating scale for a paired conversational task

Much research has explored how perceptions of speech fluency are influenced by a variety of temporal speech features (e.g. speech rate). However, less is known about the influence of non-temporal and conversational speech characteristics on fluency perceptions. To address this gap, this study explored English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instructors' perceptions of speech fluency through developing and piloting a rating scale for a paired conversational task for assessment for learning purposes. A two-phase mixed-methods sequential exploratory design (Creswell, 2009) was used. Seven trained EAP instructors watched videos of seven-minute conversations, elicited from 14 intermediate-to-advanced EAP learners. Afterwards, instructors were audio-recorded discussing their observations about learners' fluency. These recordings were transcribed and coded using in-vivo and pattern coding techniques (Saldaña, 2009). Six themes were identified: efficiency, smoothness, sophistication, clarity, facilitating topics and turns, and supporting the conversation partner. These themes informed the development of a multi-item fluency rating scale. 35 EAP instructors then used the scale to rate eight learners’ speeches. To investigate the construct-relevance of these scale items, a principal component analysis was conducted, producing two components - individual fluency and conversational fluency. Pedagogical activities aligned with the scale are provided.

@llegra: a chatbot for Vallader

AbstractExtinct and endangered languages have been preserved primarily through audio conservation and the collection and digitization of scripts and have been promoted through targeted language acquisition efforts. Another possibility would be to build conversational agents like chatbots or voice assistants that can master these languages. This would provide an artificial, active conversational partner which has knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar and allows one to learn with it in a different way. The chatbot, @llegra, with which one can communicate in the Rhaeto-Romanic idiom Vallader was developed in 2023 based on GPT-4. It can process and output text and has voice output. It was additionally equipped with a manually created knowledge base. After laying the conceptual groundwork, this paper presents the preparation and implementation of the project. In addition, it summarizes the tests that native speakers conducted with the chatbot. A critical discussion elaborates advantages and disadvantages. @llegra could be a new tool for teaching and learning Vallader in a memorable and entertaining way through dialog. It not only masters the idiom, but also has extensive knowledge about the Lower Engadine, that is, the area where Vallader is spoken. In conclusion, it is argued that conversational agents are an innovative approach to promoting and preserving languages.

The Educational Affordances and Challenges of ChatGPT: State of the Field

ChatGPT was released to the public in November 30, 2022. This study examines how ChatGPT can be used by educators and students to promote learning and what are the challenges and limitations. This study is unique in providing one of the first systematic reviews using peer review studies to provide an early examination of the field. Using PRISMA principles, 44 articles were selected for review. Grounded coding was then used to reveal trends in the data. The findings show that educators can use ChatGPT for teaching support, task automation, and professional development. These were further delineated further by axial sub codes. Eight student uses were 24/7 support, explain difficult concepts, conversational partner, personalized feedback and materials, provide writing support, offer self-assessment, facilitate engagement, and self-determination. In addition to be affordances of the AI, the data from the articles also showed limitations to ChatGPT and misuses, specifically, inaccuracies and hallucinations, potential bias, and tool limitations. Misuses are plagiarism and cheating, privacy issues and spread of false information. This study is a springboard for researchers, practitioners, policy makers and funders in understanding the emerging state of the field of ChatGPT.

LOVE'S ARCHAEOLOGY: ETHICS AND METAPHYSICS BETWEEN IRIS MURDOCH AND WILLIAM DESMOND

AbstractCentring on human perception, attunement to others, and a transcendent conception of the good, Iris Murdoch's intervention in moral philosophy remains an insightful and evocative source for ethical theory. Discerning some pervasive dualisms that hamper its coherence and development, I suggest that her work finds a generative conversation partner in the contemporary metaphysician, William Desmond. Desmond's thought offers promising avenues to overcome these dualisms by repositioning the source and nature of value and by theorising an anti‐reductive, relational ontology. Staging a constructive encounter between these two thinkers that preserves Murdoch's distinct prioritisation of attention and individuality within a Desmond‐inspired metaphysics, I present a synthetic ethical approach that promotes the ideal of attending to an other—in the givenness of its particularity, manifold surplus, and constitutive relationality—as good in itself.

Taken, blessed, broken, and shared: lived experiences of parish catechists teaching religion in public schools

Catechists play a significant role in the church’s evangelization. Despite the numerous problems they experienced, they remained faithful to their vocation. Thus, this phenomenological study intends to explore the lived experiences of the parish catechists teaching religion in public schools. Using a purposive sampling method, the data were gathered from six conversation partners coming from the north, south, and central of the diocese through an unstructured in-depth interview. There was only one overarching question and probing questions were asked to cull out significant information. The data were analyzed using recursive textual analysis adopting the framework of Lichtman's 3C's. The findings of the study reveal that in teaching religion in public schools, catechists found meaning in their vocation, encountered numerous challenges in their teaching ministry, utilized different strategies in overcoming the challenges, and experienced joy in teaching religion. Generally, they are happy and committed in their teaching ministry despite the challenges they encountered. With these results, full support is necessary to address their needs and to ensure the quality of their teaching performance.

Conveying and detecting listening during live conversation.

Across all domains of human social life, positive perceptions of conversational listening (i.e., feeling heard) predict well-being, professional success, and interpersonal flourishing. However, a fundamental question remains: Are perceptions of listening accurate? Prior research has not empirically tested the extent to which humans can detect others' cognitive engagement (attentiveness) during live conversation. Across five studies (total N = 1,225), using a combination of correlational and experimental methods, we find that perceivers struggle to distinguish between attentive and inattentive conversational listening. Though people's listening fluctuated naturally throughout their conversations (people's minds wandered away from the conversation 24% of the time), they were able to adjust their listening in line with instructions and incentives-by either listening attentively, inattentively, or dividing their attention-and their conversation partners struggled to detect these differences. Specifically, speakers consistently overestimated their conversation partners' attentiveness-often believing their partners were listening when they were not. Our results suggest this overestimation is (at least partly) due to the largely indistinguishable behavior of inattentive and attentive listeners. It appears that people can (and do) divide their attention during conversation and successfully feign attentiveness. Overestimating others' attentiveness extended to third-party observers who were not immersed in the conversation, listeners who looked back on their own listening, and people interacting with partners who could not hear their words (but were incentivized to act like they could). Our work calls for a reexamination of a fundamental social behavior-listening-and underscores the distinction between feeling heard and being heard during live conversation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Joint streaming model for backchannel prediction and automatic speech recognition

AbstractIn human conversations, listeners often utilize brief backchannels such as “uh‐huh” or “yeah.” Timely backchannels are crucial to understanding and increasing trust among conversational partners. In human–machine conversation systems, users can engage in natural conversations when a conversational agent generates backchannels like a human listener. We propose a method that simultaneously predicts backchannels and recognizes speech in real time. We use a streaming transformer and adopt multitask learning for concurrent backchannel prediction and speech recognition. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared with previous works while maintaining a similar single‐task speech recognition performance. Owing to the extremely imbalanced training data distribution, the single‐task backchannel prediction model fails to predict any of the backchannel categories, and the proposed multitask approach substantially enhances the backchannel prediction performance. Notably, in the streaming prediction scenario, the performance of backchannel prediction improves by up to 18.7% compared with existing methods.

Reflective journal as a solution for emotional regulation to anti-momster “Mama Monster”

Several cases of violence against children are increasingly mushrooming. This phenomenon is suspected to be a failure for parents to regulate the emotions they feel, especially negative emotions that often appear in everyday life. This community service is carried out with the aim of providing understanding to parents regarding the importance of regulating the emotions they feel through reflective journals. This activity is a psychoeducational seminar and reflective journal training as a solution to regulate emotions appropriately. This community service was carried out for parents at KB/TK Alam Muhammadiyah Surya Mentari Surakarta. The result of this service activity is that parents realize that anger is a natural reaction from the body that does not need to be avoided and must be transformed into appropriate behavior. Apart from that, indirectly reflective journals also become a conversation partner for parents in dealing with various emotions felt in everyday life. This community service has an impact on participants, namely parents, in terms of increasing knowledge about emotions and how to regulate them appropriately.

Brain activity supporting alternating speech for semantic words: simultaneous magnetoencephalographic recording.

Communication, especially conversation, is essential for human social life. Many previous studies have examined the neuroscientific underpinnings of conversation, i.e. language comprehension and speech production. However, conversation inherently involves two or more people, and unless two people actually interact with one another, the nature of the conversation cannot be truly revealed. Therefore, in this study, we used two magnetoencephalographs that were connected together, and simultaneously recorded brain activity while two people took turns speaking in a word association/alphabet completion task. We compared the amplitude modulation of the alpha- and beta-band rhythms within each of the 62 brain regions under semantic (word association; less predictable) and non-semantic (alphabet completion; more predictable) conditions. We found that the amplitudes of the rhythms were significantly different between conditions in a wide range of brain regions. Additionally, significant differences were observed in nearly the same group of brain regions after versus before each utterance, indicating that a wide range of brain areas is involved in predicting a conversation partner's next utterance. This result supports the idea that mentalizing, e.g. predicting another person's speech, plays an important role in conversation, and suggests that the neural network implicated in mentalizing extends over a wide range of brain regions.

A Différant Kind of Preaching: Derrida and the Deconstruction of Contemporary Homiletics

Homiletics manifests as a technē that commends certain kinds of preaching over others. As such, homiletics structures debate unaware of the philosophical assumptions operative within it. This paper challenges the logocentrism of contemporary homiletical theories in light of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive analytic. I take as my privileged conversation partner Fred Craddock, the much-lauded king of the New Homiletic. I argue that in commending inductive over deductive logic, Craddock merely inverts the logical movement of preaching, thereby reinscribing logocentrism. Utilizing Derrida’s neologism différance, I press homiletics toward what I am labeling conductive preaching, which reframes homiletical theory beyond the epistemological biases that condition it.

Exploring AI-mediated informal digital learning of English (AI-IDLE): a mixed-method investigation of Chinese EFL learners’ AI adoption and experiences

Recent advancements in natural language processing and large language models have ushered language learning into the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Recognizing the affordances of generative AI tools, this paper aims to examine the degree to which L2 learners accepted and leveraged large language model platforms (e.g. ChatGPT, Bing Chat) for the informal digital learning of English (IDLE) purposes. Employing an explanatory sequential mixed-method design, this study draws on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and collects data via an adapted TAM questionnaire and an interview guide. A total of 867 Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners answered the online survey, while 20 attended the post-survey interviews. Drawing on a validated structural model that elucidates the inter-factor relationships of perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, intention to use, and actual use, the quantitative analysis provides statistical accounts for EFL learners’ adoption of Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) technologies. The qualitative findings, derived from the interview data, reveal three key themes: (1) how perceived usefulness of chatbots for IDLE emerges from hands-on experimentation with these tools; (2) how intention to use increases as learners negotiate chatbot affordances and constraints; and (3) how actual use of chatbots for IDLE involves using these tools as tutors or conversation partners. Connections between quantitative and qualitative findings enhance our understanding of how EFL learners negotiate the affordances and constraints of highly capable AI technologies to participate in creative IDLE practices. By understanding these practices, this study draws attention to the attitudes and practices that constitute AI literacies, ultimately offering implications for future classroom practices and research.

The Be REAL Framework: Enhancing Relationship-Building Skills for Community Health Workers.

Trust plays an integral part in the effective functioning of public health systems. During the COVID-19 pandemic, distrust of public health fueled vaccine hesitancy and created additional barriers to immunization. Although most Americans have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine, the percentage of fully immunized adults remains suboptimal. To reach vaccine-hesitant communities, it is vital that public health be worthy of trust. As trusted members of their communities, community health workers (CHWs) can serve as ideal messengers and conversation partners for vaccination decision-making. We developed the Be REAL framework and training materials to prepare CHWs to work with vaccine-hesitant communities nationwide. Through the four steps of "Relate," "Explore," "Assist," and "Leave (the door open)," CHWs were taught to prioritize relationship building as a primary goal. In this shift from focusing on adherence to public health recommendations (e.g., get vaccinated) to building relationships, the value of vaccine uptake is secondary to the quality of the relationship being formed. The Be REAL framework facilitates CHWs harnessing the power they already possess. The goal of the Be REAL framework is to foster true partnership between CHWs and community members, which in turn can help increase trust in the broader public health system beyond adherence to a specific recommendation.

Afrofuturist Worlds: The Diseased Colonial Imagination and Christian Hope

This article argues that the cultural tradition of Afrofuturism offers one potential solution to the diseased Christian colonial imagination diagnosed in the work of Willie James Jennings. This diseased imagination buttresses structures of domination after colonization and creates the self-sufficient white man as an anthropological norm. Afrofuturism names an emerging cultural tradition across different media that explores potential futures in response to Black suffering. As a conversation partner for this tradition, the theology of Edward Schillebeeckx critically engages the eschatological images of the New Testament to depict Christian discipleship as practical world building. This praxis dismantles violence threatening the humanum, the new humanity announced by Jesus of Nazareth. As an example of the potential resources offered by Afrofuturism, Janelle Monáe’s multi-media Dirty Computer project evinces a practical hope reimagining social life and humanity beyond the world built by colonization, thus inspiring a decolonial Christian praxis based on eschatological hope.

Putting the child in the driver's seat: Insights into language development from children's interactions in preschool classrooms.

Children's own language production has a role in structuring the language of their conversation partners and influences their own development. Children's active participation in their own language development is most apparent in the rich body of work investigating language in natural environments. The advent of automated measures of vocalizations and movement have made such in situ research increasingly feasible. In this chapter, we review recent research on children's language development in context with a particular focus on research employing automated methods in preschool classrooms for children between ages 2 and 5 years. These automated methods indicate that the speech directed to preschool children from specific peers predicts the child's speech to those peers on a subsequent observation occasion. Similar patterns are seen in the influence of peer and teacher phonemic diversity on the phonemic diversity of children's speech to those partners. In both cases, children's own speech to partners was the best predictor of their language abilities, suggesting their active role in their own development. Finally, new research suggests the potential of machine learning to predict children's speech in group contexts, and to transcribe classroom speech to better understand the content of children's conversations and how they change with development.